Flowers on Ebony and Ivory
I’ve been photographing flowers for transparency the last few days, and processing them to appear on black and white backgrounds. The trick here is lighting, photography, and Photoshop: so three disciplines combine.
View this image larger.
In terms of lighting, you want a high key setup with strong backlighting. The exposure histogram should be biased to the right, implying nominal overexposure.
To put the flower on a black background, I convert to LAB color, and invert the L channel. I then adjust the colors and channels to create a pleasing effect.
View this image larger.
For the Fourth of July Rose below I used the lighting setup described in One-Off. This was an HDR image in the sense that I shot a number of different exposures, with the darkest more or less what the light meter liked. I started with the lightest exposure, and used layer masking to build up the final image.
View this image larger.
December 18th, 2008 at 9:37 am
[...] year in troubled times I turned to the colors of flowers. This duo is from a set that I captured in high key and for transparency during a tough [...]